Book Image

Linux Email

Book Image

Linux Email

Overview of this book

Many businesses want to run their email servers on Linux for greater control and flexibility of corporate communications, but getting started can be complicated. The attractiveness of a free-to-use and robust email service running on Linux can be undermined by the apparent technical challenges involved. Some of the complexity arises from the fact that an email server consists of several components that must be installed and configured separately, then integrated together. This book gives you just what you need to know to set up and maintain an email server. Unlike other approaches that deal with one component at a time, this book delivers a step-by-step approach across all the server components, leaving you with a complete working email server for your small business network. Starting with a discussion on why you should even consider hosting your own email server, the book covers setting up the mail server. We then move on to look at providing web access, so that users can access their email out of the office. After this we look at the features you'll want to add to improve email productivity: virus protection, spam detection, and automatic email processing. Finally we look at an essential maintenance task: backups. Written by professional Linux administrators, the book is aimed at technically confident users and new and part-time system administrators. The emphasis is on simple, practical and reliable guidance. Based entirely on free, Open Source software, this book will show you how to set up and manage your email server easily.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Linux E-mail
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
Preface

Cyrus SASL


Cyrus SASL (http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/) is Carnegie Mellon University's implementation of SASL. SASL (Simple Authentication and Security Layer), is an authentication framework described in RFC 2222 (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2222.txt).

SASL was written to provide an application-independent authentication framework for any application that needs to use or offer authentication services.

Cyrus SASL isn't the only SASL available today, but was the first to emerge and is used in various applications such as Postfix, Sendmail, Mutt, and OpenLDAP. In order to use Cyrus SASL, you need to understand its architecture, how the various layers are made to work together, and how the layers' functionalities are configured.

SASL layers

SASL consists of three layers— authentication interface, mechanism, and method. Each of these takes care of a distinct job when an authentication request is being processed.

An authentication process usually goes through the following steps:

  1. 1. A client connects...